5 QUESTIONS with Xetawave co-founder and CEO Jonathan Sawyer

Nearly 20 years after co-founding FreeWave Technologies, a Boulder-based data radio firm, Jonathan Sawyer started a new venture aimed at developing radio frequency wireless technologies.

His firm Xetawave last week announced its first order, a shipment of 1,600 radios that could bring in $1 million in sales.

Sawyer spoke briefly with the Camera about his new company.

The following has been edited for clarity and space.

1. What niche did you see in this market that led to your founding of Xetawave?

I started FreeWave back 20 years ago with Steve Wulchin and the company obviously grew pretty large in that time. We sold part of the company (to TA Associates in 2007) and after three years (when the employment contract expired), I wanted to focus on more specific niches that all the wireless companies out there are not addressing.

We developed a technology in 2010 ... a rather unique and flexible technology so that we can mix and match it with other opportunities in the wireless space.

2. What markets are you targeting?

It's mostly industrial and government markets.

3. How could this most recent contract affect your local operations?

What this order basically allows us to do is ... build a manufacturing facility and we expect that we'll be probably hiring five to 10 employees for our manufacturing operations.

4. What's on your radar for the next 12 to 24 months?

We're going to have a complete family of radio products that basically can address all of the applications that we see that the other vendors in this space are not addressing. More specifically, we have a rather intensive R&D program. ... Most of our employees today are engineers and technicians.

And the product line is going to allow us ... to see somewhere between $10 (million) to $15 million in revenue for next year.

5. You've mentioned your product meets needs that are not being addresses. In what ways does your products accomplish that?

It's a technology-driven opportunity in a sense that you have a customer that has a very specific need to send data from one point to another. What is different is that our software-defined radio technology gives the customer both the combination of high speed, much greater range and much better flexibility and immunity to interference. Those three things create an opportunity where the customer, up until now, couldn't even address it.

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